The Foreclosure Echo tells the story of the ordinary people whose quest for the American dream was crushed in the foreclosure crisis when they were threatened with losing their homes. The authors, Linda E. Fisher and Judith Fox - each with decades of experience defending low-to-moderate-income people from foreclosure and predatory lending practices - have employed a range of legal, economic, and social-science research to document these stories, showing not only how people experienced the crisis, but also how lenders and public institutions failed to protect them. The book also describes the ongoing effects of the crisis - including vacant land and abandoned buildings - and how these conditions have exacerbated the economic plight of millions of people who lost their homes and have increased inequality across the country. This book should be read by anyone who wants to understand the fallout of the last financial crisis and learn what we can do now to avoid another one.

This is the first book to explain the body of English law that surrounds the question "Are finders keepers?" This most simple of questions has long evaded a satisfactory legal answer. Generally, it seems to have been accepted that a finder acquires a property right in the object of his or her find and can protect it from subsequent interference, but even this turns out to be the baldest statement of principle, resting on obscure and confused authority. This full-length treatment of finders sets them in their legal-historical context, focusing on a fascinating area of law lying at the crossroads of crime, obligations, and property. That, on the same facts, a finder might be a thief, a bailee, and/or a property right holder has clouded conceptual analysis and prevented the simple stating of rules about finding. Nonetheless, when the applicable doctrines and policies of property law, particularly the central concept of possession, are explored and understood in the light of countervailing rules of crime and tort, it can be argued confidently that, despite centuries of doubt and confusion, English law has succeeded in producing a body of law that is theoretically and practically coherent. Property and the Law of Finders makes this argument. It is an important source of information for anyone interested in the law of personal property and also for those with broader concerns about the evolution of common law concepts.

This study of the boundaries of personal property has an inward and an outward perspective, with the intellectual emphasis on the latter. The inward-looking inquiry considers shares as items of personal property. Nowadays those who think of themselves as shareholders often stand one step removed from the share itself. They hold what this book christens a sub-share. This part of the book asks in what sense shares and sub-shares can be conceived to be things, how those things are alienated, and how they are protected in litigation. The outward-looking inquiry then asks whether personal property can be contemplated as a sub-category of the law of things and, more particularly, as the law of all things locatable in space, alienable, or vindicable in court. The outward inquiry considers three boundaries. Within the law of property the line between realty and personalty proves relatively uncontroversial; the second boundary lies between property and obligations; the third between wealth and non-wealth. The second boundary is the main concern. Respect for it necessitates a differentiation between the law of property in the strict sense and the all-encompassing law of wealth, even where the consequence might be to exclude shares and sub-shares from the law of property. In maintaining the value of careful proprietary taxonomy and in reviving the underlying concepts on which it depends, this book opposes modern scepticism as to the possibility and desirability of precision in legal classification. In these commitments it could fairly be styled a post-modern study of personal property. Winner of the SLS Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2006 - Second Prize.

Although Mexico lost its northern territories to the United States in 1848, battles over property rights and ownership have remained intense. This turbulent, vividly narrated story of the Maxwell Land Grant, a single tract of 1.7 million acres in northeastern New Mexico, shows how contending groups reinterpret the meaning of property to uphold their conflicting claims to land. The Southwest has been and continues to be the scene of a collision between land regimes with radically different cultural conceptions of the land's purpose.
We meet Jicarilla Apaches, whose identity is rooted in a sense of place; Mexican governors and hacienda patrons seeking status as New World feudal magnates; "rings" of greedy territorial politicians on the make; women finding their own way in a man's world; Anglo homesteaders looking for a place to settle in the American West; and Dutch investors in search of gargantuan returns on their capital. The European and American newcomers all "mistranslated" the prior property regimes into new rules, to their own advantage and the disadvantage of those who had lived on the land before them. Their efforts to control the Maxwell Land Grant by wrapping it in their own particular myths of law and custom inevitably led to conflict and even violence as cultures and legal regimes clashed.